Thread by @alanfeuer

On an ordinary day at one of his seven hideouts deep in the Sinaloa mountains, El Chapo would rise at noon.
A secretary would bring him his messages. He'd eat lunch, then afterward make business calls on a long-range cordless phone while strolling under the trees.

Other secretaries might bring him to look over receipts from the supplies needed to provision the camps (he usually spent $150-200,000 a month) for food, petty cash and his payroll that included two maids and a security team of about 50 gunmen.

His secretaries would also organize his appointments, keeping track of them in little handheld notebooks. Typical visitors: his cartel partners, members of his family, his wife Emma Coronel, and his various girlfriends.

The mountain camps were simple from the outside--humble casitas made of pine, a barracks for the gunmen--but behind it's tinted windows, Chapo's house had a satellite connection, a full range of appliances, a plasma-screen TV.

Testimony about all of this was delivered today at Chapo's trial by Alex Cifuentes, a Colombian trafficker who lived w/him in the mountains from 2007 to the end of 2013, serving for at least as Chapo's chief secretary.

Alex described the security set up in the mts. There were three rings of gunmen. One near the house, one patrolling the small mountains roads, and an external ring that watched airstrips and the main roads leading in the area for the military, which the guards called Los Verdes.

"The most important thing in the mountains was security," Alex said.

Just before the morning break, Alex started to testify about--of all things--a movie project that Chapo started working on in 2007. This seems to be a different venture than the Kate del Castillo debacle with Sean Penn that plagued him later.
We'll learn more soon...

So the movie.
Turns out Alex's first wife came up w/idea. The ex was upset that Chapo was in the news all the time but not profiting from his own story. The plan was to do a film so "he could make the money because the money was being made by all the papers."
Chapo was to direct.

Step one was writing a book, Alex said, or what industry people would call a "literary property." It appears Chapo and his family started generating content. A Colombian producer, Javier Rey (sp?), was brought in.

The film, alas, never got off the ground. Alex was arrested before it could be finished. But a book was apparently written. Alex said a draft was delivered to the secretary of Chapo's son, Ivan. A second draft made its way to "the lawyers," Alex said.

The military did harass Chapo in the mts, Alex said, especially when he went to war w/his former allies, the Beltran-Leyva bros in 2008. Raids became more frequent. Chapo would change camps every 20 days then & hire new guards. The old guards didn't know where he was headed next.

Always cool, however, Chapo didn't freak out when the Army approached.
He had a secretary who would warn him too early that troops were near. Chapo scolded him, saying he only needed a 5 minute lead to escape.
"Even if I'm naked, I'll run away," Alex recalled Chapo saying.

Alex also gave a few new juicy details on the story of the Christian Rodriguez, the IT guy who helped the Americans crack into Chapo's encrypted communications network.
nytimes.com/2019/01/10/nyr…

Chapo wasn't just spying on his wife Emma and several of his mistresses. He was also spying on his lawyer and his chief of security.
He was obsessed w/what people were saying about him.
"If it wasn't anything pertaining to him, he didn't really care," Alex said.

In 2013, when Chapo learned the IT guy had betrayed him, he ordered Alex to track him down and kill him. Alex had real skin in the game. Rodriguez had also helped the feds track down and arrest his older brother, Jorge Cifuentes.

So the first thing Alex did was get his personal assistant to set up a call with his mom. He told his mom to get a message to Jorge (presumably in custody) that Rodriguez was the guy "who blew the whistle."
"The communications guy was the one who did the bad deed," Alex said.

How do we know *exactly* what Alex said to his mom?
Welp....
Turns out the personal assistant, Andrea Fernandez Velez, is another cooperator in the case. And it appears she gave much of Alex's correspondence with (and through her) to the United States of America.

We even see messages of Alex asking the assistant to help him track Rodriguez down. She suggests Googling him. Then figures maybe he has a Facebook page. Trouble is, Alex knew Rodriguez only as Christian so they couldn't find him.

Mind you, we still have an entire afternoon of testimony left...

Alex has been a veritable geyser of incriminating information. He spoke about the massive coke deals (6 tons, 8 tons) his brother did w/Chapo in Ecuador.

He spoke about paying a $500,000 bribe to a Ecuadorian judge to fix the case of an Ecuadorian army captain, Telmo Castro, who was arrested for working on those deals (and who was also being bribed.)

He spoke about selling product in Canada in a partnership with a mafioso named Tony Suzuki. The drugs moved in a boat up the western Canadian coast to Vancouver. There was also an unconsummated plan to ferry drugs over Lake Vermont between docks, one in Canada, one in the US.

Chapo also wanted his people to buy adjoining ranches on the US-Canada border and, at least it seemed, move the drugs across in small helicopters.
One more session to go....

By the end of the day, Alex had testified about much more cartel business: buying C-4 explosives from from the widow of a Honduran drug trafficker and rocket-propelled grenade launchers from the corrupt Ecuadorian Army captain who working with Chapo.

He also talked about moving $ from the US to Mexico & then to Colombia.
Some of the $ was put on debit cards issued by a company his brother Jorge started with a partner. Some passed thru a crooked insurance firm in Atlanta. Some was sent by wire transfer from banks in China.

All of this insanity was on top of the bizarre scandal that erupted over the weekend involving one of Chapo's lawyers, Jeff Lichtman. According to the NY Post, Lichtman had an affair w/a client in a separate case w/whom he exchanged steamy texts messages.
nypost.com/2019/01/12/sar…

The story would've been irrelevant had Lichtman not joked w/the woman about bringing "a belly dancer" into jail to visit Chapo.
The judge had to deal with the issue. This morning he spoke w/the jurors personally to make sure they hadn't read the piece and weren't affected.

"I received an absolutely unambiguous adamant, 'What are you talking about, judge?'" he reported on his conversation w/the panel.
"It's clear to me they really did--not one of them--have any idea what I was talking about."

So that was today.
What on earth will tomorrow hold?

PS. In a discussion in chambers about the Lichtman situation, Judge Brian Cogan noted the media coverage of the trial had been "unprecedented," with reporters "thinking of every possible angle," including the fact that a lawyer in the case was texting about it w/his lover.

"Does that persuade anyone that maybe we just don't do anything with this and let it go?" the judge asked the parties.
"It persuades me," Lichtman said.

The awfulness of all of this notwithstanding, the irony here is razor sharp.
Last week, Chapo had his intimate texts w/his mistresses revealed to the jury at the trial. Now, his lawyer has suffered the same indignity--in a New York City tabloid...
nytimes.com/2019/01/09/nyr…